A Deepness in the Sky

Suddenly the picture turned crisp and smooth. As the spylet crept out from the elevator doors, Melin turned its eyes to look down an incredibly steep set of stairs, more like a ladder really. Who knew what this area was, a loading garage? For now, the little camera hid in corners and looked out upon the Spiders. From the scale bar, he could see that the monsters were of the expected size. A grown one would come up to about Brughel's thigh. The creatures stretched far across the ground in a low posture, just as in the library pictures retrieved before Relight. They look very little like the mental picture that the ziphead translators evoked. Did they wear clothes? Not like humans. The monsters were swathed with things that looked like banners with buttons. Huge panniers hung from the sides of many of them. They moved in quick, sinister jerks, their bladelike forelegs cutting this way and that before them. There was a crowd here, chitinous black except for the mismatched colors of their clothing. Their heads glittered as with large flat gemstones. Spider eyes. And as for the Spider mouth—there the translators had used the proper word:maw. A fanged depth surround by tiny claws—was that what Bonsol & Co. called "eating hands"?—that seemed to be in constant, writhing motion.

Massed together, the Spiders were more a nightmare than he'd imagined, the sort of things you crush and crush and crush and still more of them come at you. Ritser sucked in a breath. One comforting thought was that—if all went well—in just under four days, these particular monsters would be dead.

For the first time in forty years, a starship would fly across the OnOff system. It would be a very short hop, less than two million kilometers, scarcely a remooring by civilized standards. It was very nearly the most that any of the surviving starships could manage.

Jau Xin had supervised the flight prep of theInvisible Hand. TheHand had always been Ritser Brughel's portable fiefdom, but Jau knew it was also the only starship that had not been wholly cannibalized over the years.

In the days before their "passengers" embarked, Jau had drained the L1 distillery of hydrogen. It was just a few thousand tonnes, a droplet in the million-tonne capacity of the ramscoop's primer tanks, but enough to slide them across the gap between L1 and the Spider world.

Jau and Pham Trinli made a final inspection of the starship's drive throat. It was always strange, looking at that two-meter narrowness. Here the forces of hell had burned for decades, driving the Qeng Ho vessel up to thirty-percent lightspeed. The internal surface was micrometer smooth. The only evidence of its fiery past was the fractal pattern of gold and silver that glittered in the light of their suit lamps. It was the micronet of processors behind those walls that actually guided the fields, but if the throat wall cavitated while under way, the fastest processors in the universe wouldn't save them. True to form, Trinli made a big deal of his laser-metric inspection, then was contemptuous of the results. "There's ninety-micron swale on the port side—but what the hell. There's no new pitting. You could carve your name in the walls here, and it wouldn't make any difference on this flight. What are you planning, a couple hundred Ksecs at fractional gee?"

"Um. We'll start with a long gentle push, but the braking burn will be a thousand seconds at a little more than one gravity." They wouldn't brake till they were low over open ocean. Anything else would light Arachna's sky brighter than the sun, and be seen by every Spider on the near side of the planet.

Trinli waved his hand in an airy gesture of dismissal. "Don't worry about it. Many times, I've taken bigger chances with in-system flight." They crawled out the bow side of the throat; the smooth surface widened into the beginnings of the forward field projectors. All the while, Trinli continued with his bogus stories. No. Most of the stories could be true, but abstracted from all the real adventurers the old man had ever known. Trinli did know something about ship drives. The tragedy was that they didn't have anyone who knew much more. All the Qeng Ho flight engineers had been killed in the original fighting—and the pod's last ziphead engineer had fallen to mindrot runaway.

They emerged from the bow end of theHand and climbed a mooring strand back to their taxi. Trinli paused and turned. "I envy you, Jau my boy. Take a look at your ship! Almost a million tonnes dryweight! You won't be going far, but you'll be bringing theHand to the treasure and the Customers it sailed fifty light-years to find."